Killing Rites

Chapter Six

When a little before midnight I got to bed, I was asleep almost before my eyes closed. My consciousness fell away like shrugging off a jacket, and I slept through to morning without a single nightmare. I woke up with sunlight struggling in past wooden shutters and only a vague sense of where I was. With all the travel I’d done in the past year and a half, I’d built up a strategy of sorts for waking up in unfamiliar beds. First thing was not to get uptight, this happened all the time. Memory always wandered back eventually. The second was to find coffee.

The upstairs floor was scarred hardwood, and cold against my feet. I dug my bathrobe out of my suitcase, huddled into it, and went down the stairs. Arriving in the dark, I hadn’t understood the way the snow amplified light. The sun was hardly visible over the steep, pine-crowded mountains, but it was already bright as noon. I cranked up the thermostat, looked unsuccessfully through the cupboards and refrigerator for anything resembling food, and went back upstairs to raid the emergency supply of coffee from my leather backpack.

The door to the second bedroom stood open a few inches. Ex’s snores stumbled out on the air, as disoriented and tentative as I was. I paused in the hallway. His bed sat across the room, against the outside wall. Ex was curled around a pillow, his back to me. I watched for a few seconds as his rib cage rose and fell. The wound on his shoulder had bled a little more in the night, a smudge like a shadow across his skin. Somewhere in the crappy filing cabinet of my memory, a woman said something about falling into bed with a man just because they were alone in a cabin together, that it was the sort of thing men and women do. I wondered if that was true.

I’d lived with my family until I’d left home, and then on campus, and then on the road with Ex and Chogyi Jake. And Aubrey. I wasn’t a virgin, and even before I’d passed that supremely anticlimactic milestone, I’d had a pretty graphic understanding of how tab A fit into slot B.

It didn’t mean I knew what men and women do together. Not really.

Anyone who’d grown up with any actual experience—even just someone to talk to about it—would have known better than I did. Maybe after you spend a few weeks alone with a man, after you’ve washed the blood off his back, after he’s sat up until dawn with you waiting for the nightmares to fade, something just happens. No one’s responsible, and no one’s surprised. Was that how it was supposed to be? If I went to him now, slid into bed beside him, would he roll over and smile at me? It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered what his lips would taste like. Or what it would be like toslake the longing I’d already felt burning in his mind.

Was I falling for him? Maybe. Or maybe I just wanted to be held, and he was there. I was pretty sure if I pushed open the door and went to him, he wouldn’t turn me away. Just knowing that made it more tempting.

Ex shifted, and the movement sent a shock of panic through me. I walked down the rest of the hall as fast as I could on cat toes, my heart racing. I dug the little foil bag of ground coffee out of my bag and went back downstairs. I didn’t glance at Ex’s door as I passed, but I felt a little twinge of shame at wanting to.

An old plastic drip coffeemaker lurked in one of the lower cupboards, but without a filter. I banged around for a couple of minutes before I uncovered a French press still in the washing machine and a saucepan to heat up some water. When I pushed my hair back from my face, it occurred to me that I hadn’t made it all the way into the shower in a couple of days. I’d need to before we went back down the mountain.

On the countertop, my cell phone chirped its little you-missed-something notice. The number was Chogyi’s, of course. I’d forgotten to call him back or even listen to his messages. The water started to bubble, rocking the pan on its burner. I picked up the phone, thumbed the call return, and started pouring dry coffee into the French press. It was ground too fine. The coffee was going to be muddy, but it was better than none at all. The phone connection clicked.

“Hey,” I said, apology in my voice, “sorry that I—”

“Jayné,” Aubrey said. He leaned into the syllables, rushing to say my name so that he wouldn’t hear anything that wasn’t meant for him. “Hey. He’s not here. Chogyi Jake. He went to grab some fresh eggs, and he left his phone.”

I felt a reflexive shock of guilt, as if by thinking about Ex I was somehow being unfaithful to Aubrey. Like by answering the phone, he’d caught me at something illicit.

“Oh, right,” I said, and nodded even though no one could see me. “Yeah, okay. He left a message for me, so I was just calling him back.”

“I know he was wanting to talk with you. Check in.”

“Well, everything’s fine,” I said.

It was one of those pauses. I picked up the pan of water, focusing on pouring the boiling water into the press. In the glass, black coffee and pale foam mixed and settled. I could feel the pressure building to say something. This was Aubrey. This was the guy I’d been sleeping with for months. He was the guy I’d called for help when things first got weird in Denver. I could tell him anything. I could trust him with anything.

He was also the guy who I’d broken up with so he could be with his wife. Ex-wife.

“Everything’s fine,” I said again. “Everything copacetic over there?”

“Things are going all right,” he said. “We’re all a little worried about you, though.”

Drop it, Aubrey, I thought.

“Nothing to worry about,” I said. “Have Chogyi Jake gi me a call when he gets back in, okay? And tell Kim hey for me.”

“Okay,” Aubrey said. I could hear the cool come into his voice. The distance. My chest felt as if someone had hit me right on the sternum. Maybe with a hammer. I fit the top of the press into place and pushed down, the pressure against the palm of my hand slow and steady as the plunger fell.

“Talk to you soon?” I said, falsely cheerful.

“Sure. Anytime.”

I dropped the connection before he could. The stairs creaked as Ex walked down them, his steps painful and slow. The coffee smelled a little strong and I didn’t even have sugar to cut it.

“You didn’t tell him,” Ex said.

“It was Aubrey. He answered the phone.”

“Ah.”

His clothes from yesterday were ruined, but he’d had an extra set in his bag. I was going to have to figure out if this place had a laundry, or if the life of an international demon hunter was about to involve washing my underwear in the sink. I supposed I could call my lawyer, have her arrange a personal shopper to bring me everything I wanted wrapped up in gold lamé. That was supposed to be the charm of too much money, wasn’t it? Never having to worry about anything.

Ex touched my hand, and I looked up. I hadn’t noticed him coming across to me. I started to pull away, hesitated, and then went ahead and drew back my hand.

“No food in the place,” I said. “This was the best I could do for coffee.”

“It’s great.”

“It’s kind of crap.”

“It’s enough.”

He poured himself a cup and then one for me, and we stood for a minute in the chill of the cabin, drinking bitter, black coffee. A truck passed unseen on the highway, the rumble distant and softened by the snow and pine boughs.

“We can pick up some donuts on the way through Taos,” Ex said.

“Maybe some real coffee,” I said.

He smiled.

“Maybe that,” he said. “Go hit the showers. I’ll get the car defrosted.”

“About the others? Aubrey. Chogyi Jake. I just don’t want them to get hurt,” I said. And it was true, as far as it went.

He nodded, sighed, and drank off the rest of his cup in a swallow.

“I don’t either,” he said.

Twenty minutes later, my hair still damp, we were heading back down the mountain. Forty minutes after that, we were stocked on cake donuts dipped in powdered sugar. By noon, we were back in San Esteban, parking behind the adobe walls where demons had fought less than a day before.

The town was busier now. An ancient Volvo station wagon scraped down the street, a woman who could have been anywhere between sixty and eighty behind the wheehree teenage boys lounged on the street, talking among themselves, not making eye contact, and pretending to be immune to the cold. Ranchero music rolled out of one of the Quonset huts at the far side of town. The signs of actual life left the place seeming a little less eerie. The crows were there, eyeing me from the bare cottonwoods like they remembered me and weren’t entirely pleased I was back.

The little cutout where we’d parked before was full. In addition to the sedan and the Yukon, two cars with matching pro-life bumper stickers, and one with a heart-and-cross Marriage Encounter decal peeling in the window. The other had a vanity license plate that said GODSWRK. That was one way to keep from getting rear-ended. Ex parked across the street, and we got out. The air smelled of burning wood. I stopped and looked both ways before I crossed the street, only realizing how ridiculous it was after I’d already done it.

The front door swung open as we came close to it. Tamblen haunted in the doorway, nodding to each of us and stepping back into shadow. Voices speaking quickly in Spanish came softly from the back of the building.

“Is he here?” Ex asked as Tamblen closed the door behind us.

“An hour ago,” Tamblen said. “He’s with the girl’s family.”

“How’s Alexander doing?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

“Stable,” Tamblen said. “Not released yet. They don’t know what they’re looking at, so they’re being cautious.”

“That’s probably wise,” Ex said.

“You?” Tamblen asked. It was clear from his posture that he wasn’t talking to me. “Doing all right?”

“Bloodied but unbowed,” Ex said, and Tamblen hitched up a smile.

“We brought donuts,” I said.

We walked through the rooms again. They seemed smaller than the day before, the windows narrower, the light that glowed off the pale stucco dimmer. The web of cracks was going to take a lot of work to cover over, and it hadn’t happened yet. In the kitchen, Carsey was sitting on the couch with a laptop computer, tapping quietly. The sound of Spanish flowed in from the chapel. Even without knowing the language, I could pick Chapin’s voice out of the group. A woman laughed as I set the box of donuts on the little kitchen table.

“Welcome back to Chapel Perilous,” Carsey said with a wave. “Are those all sugar? Really, Chewy, what did chocolate ever do to you?”

I noticed he was keeping his voice low too. I wasn’t sure what it was about the meeting in the next room that commanded a kind of respect. It was in the air, though. The closest thing I could compare it to was being quiet in our rooms while Dad had some of the more respected men from church in the living room. Everything that wasn’t the main event became peripheral. I edged down through the rooms until, pausing half in the doorway, I found them.

They were in the room just before the black-floored ritual space. Three women, all with black hair and deep-gold skin and the same squarish nose, sat at a table across from the priests. The oldest of the women was probably sixty, streaks of white at her temples. The youngest was hardly older than Dolores. And also Dolores, sitting at the foot of the table with her hands in her lap. Father Chapin’s back was to me, and Tomás and Miguel were at his sides. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, like the end of a particularly successful dinner party. The only one who seemed out of place in the gaiety was Dolores. I edged in a little more, trying to catch her eye. When I did, she waved at me, a small motion and with a weight of desolation in her eyes I didn’t understand.

“Don’t fuss,” the older girl said, slapping at Dolores’s arm. It was a big-sister move, and I recognized it because I’d done it. Dolores’s gaze went down again, and I sloped back toward the couch and Carsey and Ex. Tamblen was halfway through one of the donuts, sugar spilling down his black front like stars.

“The older sister too?” Ex was saying.

“We thought she was the center of it. The one who was opening other people to demons,” Carsey said. “We went to confront Soledad, and she was possessed, but only by one of the spawn.”

“Wait,” I said. “Dolores’s sister was taken too?”

“Soledad and Dolores and a dozen others,” Tamblen said. “The beast in Dolores was the oldest of them. The most powerful one. All the others were its children.”

“Ah,” I said. “That’d be an awkward Mother’s Day.”

“Victories for the forces of darkness always annoy, don’t they?” Carsey asked with a lightness that seemed barbed. “Well, one disaster avoided. Full speed on to the next.”

The tone of the voices next door changed. I found I could follow the words closely enough to know they’d moved from whatever the first conversation had been about into farewells, protestations of thanks, and modest denials. I moved toward them. I wanted to see Dolores again, and I also didn’t. On the one hand, I liked her and I felt like we’d been through something important to both of us. On the other, she was well now, and I wasn’t. Knowing the shame was unjustified only made it sharper, and I covered it up by eating a donut.

The four women passed through the room, escorted by Miguel and Tomás. They nodded to the men but pointedly didn’t notice me. We passed in mutual anonymity, like patients at the STD clinic. I laughed at the thought, then swallowed it. Not a joke I wanted to explain to Father Chapin.

And there he was. The night rested hard on him. The eye he’d bled into was an orange-pink instead of full-on bloodred. His skin had the gray, powdery look of exhaustion. His curt bow of greeting had all the certainty and energy of before, but his face couldn’t quite carry it off. I hadn’t known him more than a few days, and the first thought I had was He’s getting too old for this shit.

“I’m pleased you came, young miss,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Didn’t think there’d be much question about it,” I said, trying for lightness.

“There are always questions. There are sometimes answers.” He offered up a strictly pro forma smile and turned to the men in the room. “Knowing what we do of the youg miss, what can we say?”

In the moment’s silence, I heard a car engine come to life on the street. Then another. Carsey shifted his weight, but Tomás was the one who spoke. He had a voice like honey glaze and smoke. In a different life, he’d have been Leonard Cohen.

“It cannot stop her. Or it chooses not to,” he said. “If the Enemy had been able to keep her from us, she would not have come.”

“Yes,” Father Chapin said. “It was possible before that the demon had hoped to evade us as it did the group in Hamburg. That after we saw the beast, she could leave and return of her own will is a very good sign.”

He stopped here to make eye contact with me and give what was probably supposed to be a reassuring nod.

“And if I hadn’t been able to?” I said.

“Then Xavier would have brought you,” Chapin said, as if it was obvious.

I looked at Ex. He wouldn’t meet my gaze. He’d been waiting. Even as I helped him bleeding over the threshold, he’d been waiting to see if the thing inside me took over and grabbed the car keys or flew up into the air like a Halloween witch. I wondered if he’d really been sleeping when I’d paused by his door. There was an uncomfortable thought.

“We can also say that it likes him more than it does her,” Carsey said, waving a hand at Ex. “When the demon attacked Jayné, it didn’t leap to the defense. Oh, it might have if pressed, but it wasn’t pressed, was it?”

“The attack it defended against was directed against me,” Ex said. “I didn’t see that branch coming. It would have killed me.”

“And what,” Father Chapin said, “do we draw from that?”

No one said anything. I finished my donut. The dry cake had sucked all the moisture out of my mouth, and my tongue felt like a desert. I looked around the room at all the men in their dark shirts, saying nothing. Father Chapin nodded once.

“Then it is a thing to hold in mind as we move forward,” he said. “A place to begin. This morning, we perform the blessings and a complete interview with the woman.”

“Hey. You know I’m standing right here,” I said. Chapin didn’t miss a beat.

“This afternoon, we perform de Tonquedec’s exercises with her. Once we have a clearer sense of the beast, I will permit a rest. If possible, I would like to force it to reveal its name by the day’s end.”

“Okay,” I said, “when you say ‘force it to reveal its name,’ how exactly does that go? Because it sounds a little ominous.”

“It will be in our control,” Miguel said, shaking his head. “There is no danger there, though it may be unpleasant, especially if the beast has hidden itself deep within you. To bring it out by our will instead of its own may cause some discomfort.”

I must not have looked reassured, because Carsey cleared his throat.

“Worse than a tummy bug, better than a sick drunk,” he said. “Have you ever been sick drunk?”

“No, but I had a friend in college,” I said. “Held her hair. That kind of thing.”

“Well, better than that,” he said with a smile. “The ugly part’s not until later. That’s worse than a sick drunk.”

I nodded. Carsey leaned over and tapped my forearm lightly with the tips of his fingers. For the first time since Chicago, I didn’t just half want Chogyi Jake there; I’d have sacrificed a finger if he’d appeared just then. He’d have been able to tell me just how bad this was about to be and make it all seem possible. Instead, I felt like a child with everyone saying her shots wouldn’t hurt. You know. Much.

“All right,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt. “Let’s see what we’re working with.”